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Bride Pie
Parboil some veal sweetbreads and pieces of lamb in water, and cut them into slices. Mix with them some slices of blanched ox palate, streaky bacon, a pint of oysters, and some roast chestnuts, and season with salt, mace, and nutmeg. When the pie-dish is full, lay slices of butter on the top of it, cover it with paste, and bake. When done, lift up the lid, and put into the pie four raw eggs beaten up with a little butter, the juice of a lemon, and a glass of sherry.
An old-fashioned wedding pie, essentially a rich meat pie finished with an egg-and-sherry liaison poured under the lid. The finish is where it succeeds or fails.
- The hinge: the egg liaisonFour raw eggs beaten with butter, lemon and sherry go in through the lifted lid at the end. Beat them, then temper by whisking in a few spoonfuls of the pie's own hot juices before pouring the mixture back in; poured in cold they will curdle in streaks. Return the pie to a 325F oven for 8-10 minutes so the liaison thickens and the egg is properly set rather than sitting raw in the gravy.
- Ox palateBlanched ox palate was a standard gelatinous filler in Victorian pies and is effectively unobtainable now. Substitute an equal weight of veal or beef cheek, or oxtail meat, simmered until tender — it gives the same sticky body.
- SweetbreadsSoak them in several changes of cold water for a couple of hours to draw the blood, then parboil 10-15 minutes, cool under weight, and peel away the membrane before slicing. Skipping the soak leaves them grey and metallic.
- OystersA pint is roughly 16-24 shucked oysters, depending on size, with their liquor. Add them raw among the meat rather than pre-cooking; they will be done long before the pie is, and any further simmering toughens them.
- ChestnutsRoast and peel about 8 oz, or use vacuum-packed cooked chestnuts, which serve well here.
- SeasoningThe recipe gives no quantities. For roughly 3 lb of filling, start with 1½ teaspoons salt, ½ teaspoon ground mace and ¼ teaspoon grated nutmeg — mace here is the dominant note and should be tasted, not guessed at.
- Paste and ovenA single top crust only. Puff pastry or a plain short paste both work; bake at 425F for 15 minutes to set and colour the lid, then drop to 350F for 45-60 minutes. Cut a vent so you can lift a neat lid later.
- A glass of sherryA wine glass of the period is about 2 fl oz. Use a dry or medium sherry; cream sherry makes the finish cloying against the lemon.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities beyond the pint of oysters; a filling on this scale would suit a large pie dish of roughly two quarts and serve eight or so, which fits its original purpose as a dish for a wedding table.
Bride pie belongs to a tradition older than the tiered wedding cake: from the seventeenth century onward, English wedding feasts were often crowned by a great raised or covered pie, and Robert May's The Accomplisht Cook (1660) gives an elaborate version built as several distinct compartments on one bottom. The filling here — sweetbreads, lamb, palate, oysters, chestnuts, mace and nutmeg — draws on the costly offal cuts and spices that signalled expense in grand English pies of the period. It is often said that a ring was baked into such a pie for the unmarried women to find, the counterpart of the charm in a Twelfth cake, though the custom is traditional rather than well documented. By the time Cassell's collected the recipe in the later nineteenth century the bride pie had long been displaced at weddings by iced fruit cake.